It’s no secret that the laws around sexting and child pornography are very, very loose and scattershot – it doesn’t end in convictions for many people who should be convicted, and perhaps vice versa.
Ashan Ortell, a man in Victoria who reported his daughter’s sexting to police and her school, has been slapped with child porn offences and placed on a sex offenders register, because he took the quite stupid step of copying 18 pornographic images onto his home computer with the intention of giving them to the police for investigation.
“This is a very unusual case,” said sentencing judge Jane Patrick. “The law says that people may not keep images of a sexual nature of children. Usually such images are kept for sexual motivation.”
“That is not the case in your situation. You kept the images, I am satisfied, because you were very concerned about what had been going on and foolishly decided that this was the way to deal with it.”
“Nevertheless the message has to get out to everybody that sexual images of children must not be kept on computers or any other form of equipment.”
Ortell pled guilty, but is reasonably concerned about the sex offender registry part of the sentence – he will be compelled to report to police annually, disclose all his computer and social media accounts and let police know if he intends to go on holiday for longer than a weekend. This will be the case for eight years.
“I didn’t even understand it fell under child pornography,” Ortell told the Herald Sun.
“I didn’t create this stuff, I didn’t distribute it. By law it’s mandatory that they put you on this register. But I could tell that the judge didn’t really want to do it.”
Source: Herald Sun.
Photo: Getty Images.
